Twenty-two years ago the Computer History Museum established an advisory committee (with staff, trustees, and volunteers) to explore issues of identifying, collecting, preserving, and presenting software. The Museum had just moved into its present quarters; the main Revolution exhibit was still far in the future. But the previous year, Grady Booch had gotten the ball rolling with a mass email entitled “Preserving classic software products” asking for people’s “top ten list of classic software products.” The replies to that email and the ensuing discussion made it clear that software collection and preservation were worth doing and needed to begin immediately, before more pioneers died and more source code was lost or destroyed.
Monthly meetings of the Software Collection Committee began in November 2003, covering a wide range of topics. Should collection be proactive or reactive? What priorities should guide proactive collecting? (Grady’s compiled top-ten lists provided initial input.) How should software be cataloged? How should it be presented? An initial workshop in October 2003 mostly asked questions, but a follow-up in May 2006 showed off work from CHM and from other organizations and individuals.
While many discussions raged for months, restless folks began “pilot projects” to collect materials from the original IBM 704 FORTRAN project, Doug Engelbart’s NLS/Augment project, and the APL programming language. A web site was set up to present the results of these pilot projects and the monthly meetings. An email list with an archive allowed people who couldn’t attend the meetings to participate in many discussions.
As time passed, interest in software preservation expanded. The Museum opened its Revolution! exhibit in 2011 followed by Make Software: Change the World! in 2017. Its Software History Center centralized and expanded the software-related curatorial staff. Source code releases became a regular occurrence. Work also went on outside the Museum. Software Heritage, founded by INRIA, maintains a replicated repository and populates it by crawling the world’s open-source software “forges” such as GitHub.com.
At the same time, the committee (renamed Software Preservation Group) lost mindshare: The meetings wound down in 2007, and traffic on the email list tapered down to a standstill by 2017. However, encouraged by the success of my original FORTRAN project, I had continued with a series of projects including LISP and C++. After retiring in 2010 I took on larger projects on ALGOL, Prolog, SETL, and BCPL and smaller ones on GEDANKEN, Mesa, PAL, and Poplar, plus program verification systems AFFIRM and PIVOT. Along the way, a few other people found their way to the Software Preservation Group, and created projects: Interactive C Environments (Wendell R. Pepperdine), Emacs (Lars Brinkhoff), and FOCAL (Bruce Ray).
By 2025, the “Projects” section of the Software Preservation Group web site was still serving a useful purpose, but the overall web site was showing its age: the landing page suggested activities no longer in progress, the underlying Plone content management system hadn’t been updated in 20 years created a burden on the Museum’s IT group to keep running and backed-up, and the use of a different domain deemphasized the connection to the Museum. Discussions with David Brock and Hansen Hsu of the Museum’s Software History Center led to the idea of rebuilding the web site with static HTML on a subdomain of the Museum’s regular computerhistory.org.
As the author of most of the content, I took on this effort in July 2025. It was fairly easy to convert the project web pages I’d created, but I wasn’t sure what to do with projects created by others that had seen little or no activity for years and decades. I managed to contact the original authors, and worked with them to tidy things up (especially Emacs). I also tracked down materials from the 2003 workshop, almost all the meetings (agendas, minutes, and presentation handouts), and the email archive.
While waiting for word back from the NLS/Augment and APL projects, I couldn’t resist starting a brand-new project: the Modula-3 programming language. That will be the subject of another post.
So please visit the new web site at:
https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/
Most links to the old web site will be automatically redirected. If you see things amiss, let me know.